Baptism, etc.

Tate was baptized on Sunday at our church. We spent most of the weekend getting the house ready and food prepared to have everyone over after the church service. We also had Taylar overnight on Saturday night (Josh's seven year-old sister), so we had a busy weekend. We were all set to be at church half an hour early so we could have seats at the front of the church and feed Tate before the service. Well, Avery was crouching down by Tate's carseat as we were getting ready to leave the house and the heel of her shoe caught on her dress and tore bottom layer of the dress about halfway around. The bottom layer is tulle with ribbon of fabric at the bottom, so the rip was pretty obvious. I don't sew well, much less know where any of my sewing stuff is, but I knew we had to fix the dress before church. So, Josh found needles and I managed to find some thread that matched well enough. Avery stood on the kitchen table in her dress and I did a quick, not-so-neat repair job. We still made it to church early enough and if you didn't know that I'd had to fix her dress at the last minute, you wouldn't have noticed. The dress incident was the only wrinkle in our day. The ceremony and the lunch went well and Tate handled being passed around very well. He seemed pretty content to just lay on his blanket on the floor for a bit after everyone left though. I'll post some pictures of the big day either tonight or tomorrow.

We had another therapy session and meeting with the public health nurse yesterday. Teri (the nurse) hadn't seen Tate in about 6 weeks and was very surprised to see how much he'd grown! I asked her to weigh him to make sure he was still growing well. He weighed 9 lbs 4 ozs two weeks ago at his two month appointment, and has only gained 3.5 ozs since then. We had been trying to nurse without giving him a supplement afterwards, but we'll have to go back to that to make sure he's getting enough to eat. We're also bumping up his bottles (when he's not with me) to 5 ozs, then 6 ozs next week (he's at 4 ozs now). He has another weight check next Thursday so hopefully the extra food will pay off! With Avery, she would cry to let us know that she was hungry or that she wanted more. I'm not sure if Tate is just more content, but he doesn't really cry much. I can nurse him for thirty minutes and assume that he's gotten enough, because he doesn't cry to let me know that he's still hungry. Sometimes he'll nurse for less time (especially if he's tired) so we'll give him a 3 oz. supplement and he'll take the whole thing. I guess our trouble now is that we never know if he's still hungry. For now we'll just have to keep offering a bottle after every feeding. Life with Tate is a learning process for everyone.

Avery has been enjoying our spring weather. She loves to play in the backyard by herself. It's fully fenced, so it's nice to be able to just let her play without worrying that she'll run off. We still have to keep a pretty close eye on her though. I check on her every few minutes and about half of the times I check she's doing something she's not supposed to. Her favorites are splashing in the water that collects in her toys when in rains, throwing toys over our fence into the neighbors yard, trying to climb the fence into the neighbor's yard to get the toy she just threw over, and playing fetch with Jersey (except she throws her own toys, not Jersey's). As long as we keep checking on her, she does okay though. It's nice that she can be outside by herself though, because it's been too cold for Tate to go out and she doesn't understand that yet. So, she gets to go out but he and I can stay in and watch her through the patio door. Hopefully spring will be here to stay soon so that we can all spend time outside!

Josh got his new pickup this weekend, so he's been enjoying driving it around. I told him the neighbors will miss hearing his squeaky car pulling out of the driveway early every morning... he didn't agree with me. The pickup belonged to Josh's dad, so he is honored to have it.

The whole family is heading to Bismarck this weekend for a seminar. I'll take Tate with me to the seminar (I'm hoping he'll sleep most of the time) and Josh and Avery can hang out and swim at the hotel. Should be fun (for the two of them anyway :)